this is a bit of a general complaint from laddering in the past week after being away from some months, but the overall feel is that the current sets are way too tuned towards HO. One may say, this is more a fault of game freak for releasing so many HO mons, but its not fun to rand 6 mons that are all offensive, can't switch into anything, and lose to the wrong mon. In older gens, I can get a decent enough variety in my team.
We need more defensive/utility sets.
I agree with you. However, to explain why gen 9 has ended up in the situation it's in where it's tuned towards HO deserves some explanation.
The first side of it is that rands actually does listen to the community as much as possible, and overwhelmingly the community dislikes defensive and utility sets more than offensive sets. There are significant portions of the community who would be happiest if every mon in the game were running some kind of setup sweeper kit (and unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective, an increasing number of defensive mons can now do that thanks to Iron Defence + Body Press). Many people on the rands auth also prefer offence across the board. I'm not one of them -- I've done sweeps of the format and pushed for additions like phasing / Haze / Clear Smog to try and maintain balance, and such sweeps have also been accepted by leadership. Leadership does actually do its best to listen to both sides, and effectively implements both sides...
...but the primary part of it is that sets are actually winrate tested now, and balance / defensive / utility builds have more skill expression than offensive sets do. Offensive sets don't have 0 skill expression, of course. You still need to position the mon onto the field so that it's safe to set up, or make a risk vs reward calculation of which choiced move to click. But anything other than a setup move or attack is harder to use optimally, and so when higher skill expression sets are winrate tested, their winrates are lower than their actual viability is, because players just don't know how to use them properly. This means that a utility set has to be even better than a setup set in order to get itself a positive winrate change during testing. An example of where this has happened somewhat recently is with Revavroom, who had a great utility set from the start of the format up to a couple of months ago. Chat began being
full of requests to delete utility Revavroom, and when it was tested on ladder its winrate increased by something like 2%, one of the biggest winrate increases from a new set we've had in Gen 9. Utility Revavroom was good, but you can't ignore a statistic like that.
It's not actually a bad thing necessarily that this is the case. This comes down to the "should rands cater to the greatest number or the greatest skilled" debate. Rands leadership firmly prefers to cater to the greatest number, and when significant proportions of the community cannot use sets like utility Revavroom well, and these instances are confirmed during testing, it is a good thing under that philosophy to remove it from the format. I fall into the greatest skilled camp, under the belief that facilitating skill in sets first will force worse players to improve, but it is neither the opinion of the leadership nor of the majority of the community, which is also fine. A major case for the greatest number argument is (to use Revavroom again, it's just the most relevant example here IMO) that because winrates are also used for level balancing, the fact that people en masse were so bad at using utility Revavroom actually meant that its Shift Gear set was overlevelled. It was the best setup sweeper in the format bar none for a short period, until the utility set was removed and its winrate rose to the point that it quickly caught level nerfs.
...with all of that said, if you want to do a sweep of the format and suggest a number of defensive- / utility-oriented changes, I can guarantee we'll carefully consider them. More utility is a good thing.